


The Coming of Spring

by Bakcheia



Category: Holly Tree - Dar Williams (Song)
Genre: Gen, Implied marital rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 22:09:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1099161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bakcheia/pseuds/Bakcheia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, being haunted forever by the malevolent ghost of a vengeful witch is the happiest ending you could have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Coming of Spring

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Settiai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Settiai/gifts).



> Surprise spare time means a surprise extra treat!

Ellen moved into the farm the night of her wedding. Her courtship had been brief but pleasant and the farmhouse was large – large enough for her to have her own room for the first time in her life – and beautifully appointed. She loved the smoothness of the heavy furniture, the warm ochre of the flagged floor; she even loved the walls of the place, which had so many layers of whitewash that they looked more like icing than stone.

Despite all these things - and a mattress stuffed with goose down besides - the first night in her new house was a terrible one. She has three sisters and had never slept alone before, always with familiar things around her and a familiar presence by her side. She tossed and turned for what seems like hours, then slept eventually and woke comforted, thinking herself at home, for there was a weight in the bed beside her. Then the scratchiness of the new sheets reminded her: she is married now and in a different house, a house, people said, that used to be the home of a witch. Ellen had laughed, thinking they said it just to tease her but now there is something in bed with her and it is not heavy enough to be her husband.

She tries to shriek and scramble out of bed but it is as if all her limbs have been weighted down with stones and she doesn't move even an inch. She cannot get away from it. She cannot even turn to look at it. Behind her, the thing in the bed starts to move, like it means to rise up and put out a hand. She makes one last great effort, to move or to call for help,  _anything_ , but she is held in place as surely as a butterfly with a pin through it's heart. There is a stirring of breath near her ear – the thing is only inches away and looking at her.

“Wake up” it says.

All at once it is bright morning and Ellen is safe in her own room, the bed around her is cold and empty. She will get up and make breakfast in her new kitchen with the ochre flags and white walls and her husband will come in and kiss her and she will forget what she has dreamt during the long night.

She wonders what room the witch would have slept in while she was here and if her husband, who is admirably thrifty, would have bought all new things when he moved in or kept the furniture already there.

 _It was a dream_ , she tells herself. This is not the witch's bed. She probably wasn't even a real witch.

 

Though spring has come to the rest of valley it seems still winter here, the hard frozen ground giving way only reluctantly to the edge of the plow, the grey flanks of the ploughhorse steaming with effort in the cold and pale sunlight. Good soil, her husband had told her with satisfaction, the best in the country, but with every step she has to stop to pick up the rocks that stick up like knobs of bone through the bare, unforgiving earth.

 

She takes her aches to bed with her that night and falls asleep instantly this time, only to dream that she walks along the furrows yet, thighs and back burning with the effort of bending and tugging. The horse in front of her is a bright bay, roaned with age but still useful, broad hooves churning up the earth, the tipped forward ears showing how it knows its work and enjoys it.

It is not her husband's horse and the figure before it is not her husband.

 _Let it not be the witch_ , she thinks,  _let her not have been a real witch_.

The figure straightens, hands in the small of her back - for it is a woman, sure enough, a woman in a worn dress soaked right through with sweat, a woman with hair like the horse's; chestnut shot with grey. The figure turns and she braces herself for a horror, hands trembling round her basket of stones. Will it be no face at all that she has, or a face that is wrong somehow, a face that shows she has the devil in her.

It is a face like any other woman's, and she meets Ellen's eyes and smiles at her and her basket, as if to thank her for the help.

 

One of the sharp white stones in the field has twisted its way, all unnoticed, into the soft part of their plough horse's hoof and now he stands groaning in the stables, with swollen legs and inward turned feet.

He is only seven years old and had been part of her dowry, foaled on her father's farm. She had been eleven at the time and had watched him being born in a tangle of legs, ginger coat darkened to black with the birth fluids and poor lighting. When she was fourteen and he was three, she had climbed out of her window and ridden him secretly four times around the paddock. He had greyed out by then and his white coat had thrown the moonlight back at her as they galloped. It was the happiest she has ever been and she knows that it is awful of her, that her happiest time was with a horse and not her husband, but it is true, anyway.

“He'll mend, probably” her husband says over dinner that night and when she looks up he misunderstands and specifies.

“The grey horse. He'll mend, if we're lucky”

The grey horse, her husband always calls him. Or the plough horse, or the grey, but when he had been born she had felt his slick nose thrust into her hand and had named him Jerry.

 _If we're lucky,_ he had said. They had not had much luck, lately and she shivers in a sudden chill.

There is no use in a lame horse and if they are not lucky her husband will shoot him.

 _Let her not have been a witch,_  she thinks,  _let her not have been a real witch._

 

There is still no sign of pregnancy, though he knocks on her door near every night (a formality only, for he enters before she has time to give permission).

Her nearest neighbour is the town midwife and she decides to call on her, even though all the friendly notes she sent have gone unanswered and the woman will not even meet her eyes in the marketplace.

The woman invites her in and tells her that her name is Mercy, which should have been an excellent name for a midwife but instead her cold face and angry eyes make it seem inappropriate. Still, there is no one else, for the doctor is a man of science and she is worried he will laugh at her.

The midwife laughs at her anyway and it is not a nice sort of laugh.

“You think you have been cursed? By  _Emily_?”

It is the first time anyone has mentioned the witch by her first name and it takes a second for Ellen to work out who it is the midwife means. She is both insulted and relieved by the woman's incredulity.

“Emily,” Mercy continues, “Never struck me as the cursing type. Certainly she wouldn't kill little babies in the womb, just because her own was taken from her.”

It is also the first time anyone has mentioned a baby.

Ellen blinks.

“There was a baby? Where is it? How do you know?”

Her ignorance seems to soften the midwife, her anger never lessens but Ellen has the sense that it is no longer directed at her. When Mercy next speaks, it is as if she has decided to trust her.

“I was there when they came for her; she was a month too early and she was terrified.”

Ellen tries to imagine it. The witch in her stone-flagged kitchen, pacing and groaning, afraid for the little life churning about in her womb. It is probably wrong to sympathise with a witch, even a little, but Ellen wants a baby so much herself and can't help it.

“I told her everything would be alright, it was near enough her time and they rarely suffer for being a few weeks early. A blessing even, at her age, for it to be a little small. It didn't comfort her, I thought she was frightened of a miscarriage but I know now it was the men she was afraid of. Men on horseback coming to take her baby from her”

Ellen doesn't ask the question, she knows by the way the woman looks down at the table that her husband had ridden with them.

“As for where the baby is now...I told her  _everything_  would be alright. Why, they won't even hang a pregnant woman, for fear of harming the innocent. I stopped her from struggling when they took him from her arms – she wanted to fight but I was worried-” and she interrupted herself with a bark of mirthless laughter “-I was worried the baby might get hurt.”

“I stayed with her, so I don't know where they took him. But I never saw them kill him, never saw a body and so I hoped...I hoped...” She rubs her hands over her face.

“But then your husband inherited the farm and I knew it was no good”

Ellen's confusion must have been obvious.

“It was a boy you see,” Mercy continued, “and the farm would have gone to him when his mother died.

Ellen feels a chill that penetrates right down to her very bones. Nobody had told her that her husband was related to a witch. The midwife sees her expression and hurries to reassure her, but though her words are kind her voice is very cold and her eyes stay as angry as ever. Her husband was only a very, very distant relation, she says, a nephew twice removed and surely would not have inherited the farm at all if the witch had had any other family yet living.

Besides, Ellen comforted herself on the way home, she probably hadn't even been a real witch.

 

Jerry's feet heal eventually and the swelling in his legs goes down - but he is not what he was and although he could work again it is not for so hard or for so long as he used to. He is no longer worth his meat, her husband says and so he is led away and sold for that. He is a practical man her husband, and the thought doesn't please her as much as it should. When he comes to her that night she flinches a little when his cold hands grip her by the hips and wonders exactly how practical he is.

 

Two days after Jerry has been sold she finds a small white bone amongst the stones in the field and shrieks. It is only a small bone, the bone of a tiny thing and she could easily have missed it, would have missed it, except that there was a part of her that has been looking.

_I never saw them kill him, never saw a body and so I hoped...I hoped..._

Her husband comes running at the sound and kneels down to unearth the rest; spindly ribs and a long yellow skull, a lamb, probably, dead years before. He laughs at her and she laughs too, relieved, of course it wasn't a baby, there couldn't have been a baby, not at her age and with a husband so long dead. Except his hands tremble as he smooths the earth back, skin grey under a layer of grime and his laughter is as relieved as hers is.

It is still so cold, down in the hollow of the valley, as if spring will never come again.

 

Ellen is visited by the witch again that night. She lies in the same state as before, her limbs leaden with chill and the darkness pressing her into the mattress. There is an arm encircling her waist, cold and clutching, the touch a fresh horror to crowd her nights - but it is not fear she is feeling, not quite.

Behind her the woman is weeping, her face pressing against Ellen's shoulder and her tears soaking her nightgown. She feels a mad desire to turn and comfort her, but she cannot move and anyway, it is a witch in bed with her and she should be afraid.

 _She was a witch, a real witch._ She tells herself,  _a witch who fills the earth with stones and makes horses lame. A witch who will blight our crops and bring us to ruin._

 _Oh, my baby,_ the woman weeps behind her,  _oh, my baby, what have they done with my baby?_

 

Ellen goes to the marketplace to buy wool, in shades of pale pink and blue and yellow. She is always surprised by how warm it is outside their little stony hollow and how full of life, but the new stirring inside her is reassuring. Life will come to everywhere, eventually.

There is only one place in town that does not show all the signs of the coming spring. In the centre of the marketplace is a yellow patch of grass, where even the most aspiring trader will not pitch their stall. Nobody has said anything, but Ellen knows that this is where the gallows stood for so long, starving the grass of sunlight and keeping winter in its shadow.

She buys her wool and means to head for home, but instead finds herself standing on the edge of the dead patch, as one might at a grave. She doesn't want to be here but she doesn't want to go back to her house either.  _Because of the witch_ , she tells herself. It makes no sense to avoid the cold house only to linger at this dead place but she cannot bring herself to say 'because of my husband'.

Love has always come to her so easily, so naturally. She loves her parents, her sisters, the apple tree that grows outside her window and fills her room with scent. She is sure she will love her child when it comes and she wants very badly to love her husband as she knows she ought and always thought she would.

She thinks of the woman as Mercy had told of her, worn down by hard labour, with ugly square hands like a man's – but always very kind, even when she was tired - and strong enough to manage by herself. Not that she'd have had to for much longer, if her neighbour was to be believed.

In a few months time it will be summer, the yellow patch of grass will have turned green again and warmth will come to their valley.

Her husband will likely come to her room tonight, even though he knows she is with child, even though he doesn't have to and that is good, isn't it? To have a husband who comes when he doesn't have to and never causes her any pain.

There will be other horses. Gentle horses with broad backs, who will carry her laughing children as her husband leads them out to harvest.

And tonight he will be waiting for her, her practical husband with the cold deliberate hands, who everyone said she was lucky to have.

He will be waiting for her, even though he does not have to and he will come to her room every night, even if she never learns to love him.

Ellen wants very badly to love her husband

 _Of course she was a real witch_ , she thinks, turning for home,  _she must have been a real witch._


End file.
